Somehow, this doesn't seem like what Microsoft had in mind when it came to amateur designers playing with Kinect technology.

One of Microsoft's big selling points for the Kinect's crossover to PC is that amateur developers can use the device to create all sorts of new programs. Some of these are insanely brilliant, like that guy who turned the Kinect into an affordable motion capture system. However, not all creations are quite so impressive (or tasteful). Witness: Kinect Russian Roulette.

Russian Roulette, in case you haven't heard of it before, is a (potentially) lethal game that's played with a revolver. You load one bullet in the gun, spin the cylinder, place the muzzle against your head, and pull the trigger. Now, onto the Kinect version.

The hack is an art project by Theo Watson, who created it for Art Hack Day. Watson created the hack over a few short hours, using openFrameworks 007 and ofxKinect. Essentially, the Kinect recognizes both your face and your hand (shaped like a handgun). Now, the kinect will also recognize your thumb mimicking the action of a gun's hammer, and a virtual round is fired. As a result, you have a 1/6 (or, in this case, 1/8) chance of blowing yourself to a digital Kingdom Come.

I'm not the only one who sees this becoming the next great party game, am I? Or at least an opportunity for mainstream news pundits to once again condemn the evils of videogames.

This sounds awesome, now all we need is a re-make of Persona 3: FES that exploits it.

You can point a "gun" at your head in front of your screen and say "Persona" to make your guy attack... it will be awesome. :)

Actually in a sick way I'm enough of a SMT fan where I'd probably actually do that and have fun.

Still, this seems almost like yesterday's contreversy.

The thing is that the gaming media, and the media in general, needs to grow the heck up. People do offensive things with computers to get a rise out of people, we've known this since the days of the bloody Apple 2. If you give people attention it just encourages other people to up the ante in hopes of getting their 30 seconds of fame. The guy making "Kinect Russian Roulette" is just the new face of stunts like guys making "Assault On Smurf Village" or "Castle Smurfenstein" for the Commodore 64, albiet updated for the new technology.

See, by covering things like this the geek media simply makes it more likely that the mainstream media will notice, and it will actually become an issue.

Scrumpmonkey:Personally i just think this project is Shooting its self in the foot. I'm sure the PTC will give us a list of Bullet points on why this game will make our children's heads explode or something silly.

Wow, a whole barrel of puns. But that last bit about the PTC is kind of a hollow point considering this this isn't technically television.